Updates on the California bus crash

• Get all the latest updates on the bus crash involving Southern Calfornia students in Orland, Calif.

Banning High School seniors Jonathan Gutierrez and Karen Duarte sleepily boarded a bus at 6 a.m. Thursday for what they expected to be an introduction to their future.

They were more than halfway to Humboldt State University, where they had already been admitted, for several days of a Preview Plus college tour for low-income and first-generation students, when a FedEx truck crossed a median and collided head-on with their bus about 100 miles north of Sacramento at 5:41 p.m.

Shocked and injured, Gutierrez and Duarte escaped as the vehicle burned, according to Gutierrez’s account of the collision on Twitter.

A Carson High School student also was on the bus and may have been injured but survived, according to Carson city officials. A total of 48 people were aboard, including 19 Los Angeles Unified High School students. Five students and five adults died.

“can’t believe this just happened ... I was asleep and next thing you know I was jumping out for my life,” Gutierrez wrote on Twitter.

He said he suffered a bruised leg, cut eyebrow and numerous scratches before he escaped through a window but was “beyond thankful i’m still here.”

From his hospital bed, Gutierrez told ABC News: “I heard people yelling. When I woke up, I heard the crash. That’s when I flew out of my seat. The entire bus was covered in smoke from the fire. ... A couple kids broke windows so everyone could get out because we saw the fire was spreading. ... I jumped out. It was hard to breathe in there. ... The smoke was everywhere. You could not see where you were going. … It was so traumatizing. People were panicking and just throwing themselves out the window.”

Duarte, he said, “was in shock, but she’s OK.”

Los Angeles Councilman Joe Buscaino said his office worked to help get Duarte’s mother, Maria, who lives in Wilmington and doesn’t speak English, on a flight to Sacramento and car trip to Orland to meet her daughter, according to a spokesman for his office. Buscaino accompanied the mother and a relative to Los Angeles International Airport on Friday evening. They are expected to return Sunday with Duarte.

American Airlines sponsored Maria Duarte’s flight to see her daughter, who suffered injuries to her face. She was sleeping and sitting only four seats behind the driver when the accident occurred. Her cousin, Susana Cervantes, said Karen told her there was fire everywhere and that students were breaking windows to get out of the bus.

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Not wanting to worry her mother, Karen, a Banning senior, called Thursday night to say she’d been in a “minor accident,” according to KNBC Channel 4 news. It was only when her mother later saw the news coverage that she realized how serious the accident had been.

On Friday morning, Banning High School students came and went to classes as usual. Travis Collier, an instructional director, said crisis counselors were available.

Frank Whitlatch, a spokesman for Humboldt State University, said the students were “coming to learn what it was all about and see what college life is like.”

Two other busloads of potential students arrived without incident, and the university offered counseling services while they worked Friday morning to connect with families of those who had been injured and killed, he said.

Long Beach Unified School District officials said two of their students received “non-life-threatening injuries” aboard the bus, including one who attended California Academy of Mathematics and Science on the Cal State Dominguez Hills campus in Carson and one from Polytechnic High School.

City News Service and staff writers Donna Littlejohn and Carley Dryden contributed to this report.